When roofing material is manufactured, it is in the form of a continuous sheet made up of lengths spliced together. This sheet must be cut to predetermined lengths and rolled for commercial usage. These smaller rolls are formed on a mandrel and are prepared in various modes including manual control and, more recently, automatic electrical control as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,099,682 issued July 11, 1978, to Alfred L. Benuska. There are various difficulties associated with these prior machines for preparing roll material that this invention is designed to alleviate. Such difficulties are in the hardships in trouble shooting, in high levels of wear and difficulty in repairing, the loss of considerable sheet material inherent in the feed through type mandrel, difficulty in feeding this material into a winder, controlling the length of the finished product, controlling the tension of the web without constant adjustment, controlling the noise levels, providing faster operation, and the difficulty of running open faced gears faster than recommended, and operating such gears out of mesh. Further, difficulty in the control of adding product to the roll that is necessary because of the splice required to join the web from the end of one supply roll to the beginning of the next supply roll, the difficulties of using chain drives, inaccessibility of control panels to enable operators to perform multiple tasks; these and other difficulties in the prior art led to the improvements found in this invention.
Objects of this invention are to alleviate the various difficulties set forth above as well as further advantages set forth in the following specification.